The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's regulation of factory-scale feedlots
has lagged far behind that of other large industries. Despite years of citizen
complaints, the agency did not regulate air emissions from manure-storage
lagoons until neighbors of a large hog feedlot proved it was violating state
health standards. Odor from large feedlots is now a widespread environmental
problem. Critics say the PCA has been equally lax in protecting the state's
water.

WHEN A GIANT HOG FEEDLOT storing more than 40 million gallons of manure went up
a mile from her family's farm in Renville County in southwest Minnesota, the
first problem Mary Elbert noticed was the smell. Later, she discovered the water
in the drainage ditch that runs under the driveway to her farmhouse was often
covered with algae, brown scum, and whitish foam.

Elbert: We drive across the drainage ditch every time we go up to our yard, and our
kids used to spend lots of time down there playing. Now I don't let them near
it.

Big operations like the one near Elbert are heavily concentrated in Renville
County. Elbert worries that manure from their storage lagoons is being applied
too heavily to the fields and is running through underground drainage pipes and
into ditches and waterways. Sometimes, liquid manure is transported from lagoons
to the fields in hoses as much as two miles long, and she's seen leaks in the
hoses.

Elbert: We had a case last fall where we had the hoses spraying
into the air right by an intake; that's a direct line to our water
system.

Elbert had the water in the drainage ditch under her driveway tested by a
private lab.

The tests found high levels of fecal coliform bacteria that she feels are coming
from the big new hog operations. She and other neighbors have done sporadic
sampling of brown, scummy ditch water and found the same kind of bacterial
contamination.

The summer before last, 100,000 gallons of manure spilled into Beaver
Creek, just a few miles from Elberts house. She and other neighbors followed a
trail of dead fish up the creek, taking water samples at each bridge. After 11
miles, they traced the spill to a hog feedlot.

Elbert: Sure we had better things we could be doing, but I'm so tired of them
getting by with this, time after time after time. It's like the air quality. I
mean, when we have to work in our gardens according to wind direction, when we
have to work in our fields according to wind direction, there's something wrong.
And nobody's listening to us.

The spill, which the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Minnesota
Pollution Control Agency confirmed came from a hog lot, killed 600,000
fish.

Richard Serbus, who lives on Beaver Creek, says it looked like a "floating bog"
of manure. Serbus' small dairy herd gets its drinking water from the creek.
Half his cows aborted their calves. His veterinarian, concerned about Serbus'
family's safety, told Serbus to get the well to his house tested. Nitrates in
the well, which were at a safe level before the spill, had hit 35 parts per
million, more than 3 times the drinking water standard. Serbus thought of
suing, but was told he didn't have a case. He can only tally up his losses.

Serbus:
We lost half the calves. We had to get them rebred It's six months of
production of the cows. We went to filtering our water in the house. Ma and I were both sick; we were sick and we couldn't
figure out why and we had belly-aches and diarrhea and my gosh, here we get
our water tested and we're drinking 35 nitrate water. I feel that somebody
should have been telling us, "Hey, there's a possibility here, do something."

Records from the Department of Natural Resources, which tracks fish kills,
show in the years since livestock concentration has increased in Minnesota, the
number of confirmed manure spills has been climbing steadily, from one in 1994
to 10 last year. Four of those were in Renville County, where Serbus and
Elbert live.

Neighbors of the big feedlots also worry that contaminants from the giant manure
lagoons are slowly seeping into the groundwater. They point to the example of
North Carolina, the first state where such lagoons were built on a wide scale.
In that state, hog lagoons have caused widespread contamination of drinking
water wells. North Carolina State Toxicologist Kenneth Rudo says the state began
offering free well-testing to neighbors of hog feedlots in 1995, after a series
of massive manure spills.

Rudo: In about 3 years we've test about 1600 wells and about 35 percent
of them have some contamination from nitrates, and about 10 percent of them have
levels of nitrates at or above the drinking water standard of 10 parts-per-million. We've seen several wells that are actually over 100 parts-per-million.
And anything over ten poses a direct health risk to humans, especially infants, from risk of
methemoglobinemia, which is blue baby syndrome.

Blue baby syndrome is a potentially fatal condition in which nitrates from
drinking water disrupt the baby's ability to use oxygen.

Renville County's Elbert and a number of her neighbors - including Julie Jansen -
have had their wells tested for nitrates and fecal bacteria. So far, the wells
do not show contamination, but Jansen, a well-known local activist who helped
prove air emissions from Renville County hog lagoons were violating state
health standards, is not reassured.

Jansen: It's very scary. You don't know what's going to happen. You look at
the history of North Carolina, they have serious problems there, and everything
they have said is not going to happen in Minnesota, is happening in Minnesota.

As problems with large feedlots mount, the Minnesota Pollution Control
Agency has come under increasing criticism for its handling of the issue.
In recent years, the PCA has permitted more than 100 industrial-scale,
multi-million gallon earthen manure lagoons. Earthen lagoons in Minnesota must
be lined with two feet of compacted clay and sometimes a synthetic liner as
well. PCA officials say that will prevent the kind of problems seen in other
states. Peter Sandberg, compliance coordinator for the southern part of the
state, defends the agency.

Sandberg: None of the new facilities are being permitted without getting an
engineering review. We do have quite rigorous standards for both earthen-basin construction and for concrete-pit construction that are designed to make
sure there won't be any sort of catastrophic failure or an unanticipated leak.

And Sandberg says the PCA simply doesn't have enough staff to inspect and
supervise every large facility to make sure manure spills like the one that hit
Beaver Creek don't reoccur. He says looking at the big picture, such spills may
not be the main problem anyway.

Sandberg : There's a huge potential pollution problem, and it's one that we're
real concerned about; but my experience in having visited literally hundreds and
hundreds of feedlots over the last 3 years is that the much more serious ongoing
problem is the aggregate from the smaller facilities.

Minnesota has thousands of smaller, older manure pits and open lots. The exact
number is not known. PCA officials say big feedlots are much more closely
monitored than these smaller facilities.

In the past 4 years, the PCA has installed monitoring wells around 19 large
feedlots. PCA senior hydrologist Dave Wall says so far, monitoring has shown
elevated nitrogen in the groundwater from only one of the 19.

Wall: The research sites where we actually collect what seeps down through
the clay liner's containing the manure have found that what gets down through
the clay liner looks more like water; more like tapwater. So far, the measured
amount of nitrogen moving through the clay liners is generally less than that
from a typical septic system, or less than about an acre of corn cropland that's
fertilized.

Wall says the PCA is concerned about how well the clay liners will hold up over
time, and start more monitoring of older earthen basins next summer.

University of Minnesota Geologist Calvin Alexander says that's not enough.

Alexander: We went through this concept of clay liners stopping contamination
with landfills in the 70s and 80s, and the conclusion there is unambiguous,
and that is that the clay liners sooner or later fail and that materials get
through them.

Last year, the Minnesota Legislature passed a moratorium on earthen manure-storage
basins for hogs, but Alexander says that does nothing to prevent long-term problems from the ones that have already been built. In addition, the PCA
still permits earthen lagoons for dairy and beef cattle. Many of them are being
built in the Karst geology of southeast Minnesota, where cracks and holes in
the limestone bedrock lead directly to aquifers.

Last year in Olmsted County in southeast Minnesota, 125,000 thousand gallons of manure
leaked through a hole in the limestone bedrock and emerged in a spring feeding
the scenic Root River. A farmer in neighboring Fillmore County, who built a 300,000
gallon lagoon over limestone bedrock in 1991, discovered a year later
that leaking manure had turned his well into what he describes as a "cesspool".
The University of Minnesota's Alexander says the PCA should stop permitting earthen lagoons in
areas of the state that are geologically vulnerable.

Alexander:
The most dangerous areas in my experience are the most densely Karst
areas of southeastern Minnesota. There are sand plains elsewhere in the state
that are probably as vulnerable or more vulnerable than the Karst terrain's are and, yes, they have approved the building of many facilities in those kinds of areas.

The question of how to regulate animal agriculture is one of the major issues
that will confront the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency under the new administration
of Governor Jesse Ventura. Former Governor Arne Carlson was a strong supporter of
the expansion of Minnesota's livestock industry, and PCA officials say privately
that under the Carlson administration, the agency was under pressure to permit
large livestock facilities.

State legislators have ordered an investigation into the PCA's regulation of
animal agriculture. The legislative auditor's report is due out later this
month.

Mary Losure covers environmental issues for Minnesota Public Radio. You can reach her
at mlosure@mpr.org.